Some builds just straight up disappeared completely. For example, VD/DD spellslinger was gone when they nerfed spellslinger to the ground. And then in some seasons they make another change and some build suddenly ressurects from the ashes.
But my point is that you won’t ever be able to make it so that all classes are balanced. You can try to balance them, but at any given point you’ll always have 1-2 that are “the strongest” and 1-2 that are “the weakest”. I don’t think true balance, where you can just select any class/build/skill and have it perform the same as any other, is impossible.
BG3 was flawless for me even when there were some bugs that were adressed so fast I was never faced with them. They took a looong time to deliver a smooth and nice release experience.
Yes they do this every season and they did so in beta and on release. Then again everything up untill today is in a playable state to finish all content (besides map mods you avoid because of your build). Somone even made a dmg on death build those days that killed every boss encounter ingame.
There will never be 100% equality and balancing and there will be metashifts but that’s no excuse to deliver an unbalanced game because everyone else is doing so. VD/DD was stupid OP when it was introduced but there are still VD/DD builds up to 3.18 that managed to play all content so what? Look at cyclone for example. People said cyclone is bad and dead and there are some happy campers running it down with the cyclone skill.
I remember the day when somone played a swipe Duelist just to show people it can be easiely done with a skill noone plays and seemed dead in the water. PoE offers so many possibilities to setup a toon that you can’t compare it even. I can pick and choose in PoE and I can’t pick and choose to the same extend in LE. No matter what if a toon is in an unbalanced and underpowered state in LE you are far worse off then playing an underpowered skill in PoE. As a matter of fact (and circling back to the topic) you can simply spend several hundret chaos to respecc your whole toon if you don’t want to replay the whole game.
So a weak build in LE is much more fubar then a bad build in PoE but that’s a simple thing to fix. Just don’t play LE if your class isn’t fotm or get some balancing groundwork done so no class feels bad or underpowered. There will always be a fluctuating meta and that’s okay I’m just not okay if said meta leaves some builds dead in the water while others do everything twice as fast.
I think fairness is a concept we all heared about.
But that is literally what happens all the time in PoE. When I got back to try PoE for a bit this year, I looked up the BL miner ascendant build that I had so much fun with during Heist league. And I couldn’t find any updated guide for it. Almost all guides were even from before the passive tree rework. You can find maybe a guide or two with shadow or saboteur, but, as far as I can see, ascendant BL miner is dead.
If you’re a theorycrafter you can possibly make some half-decent build with it, but for the vast vast majority of players, it’s a dead build. You either use some other ascendant build with a different skill or use some other class for BL mines.
How does that translate differently to LE? VK Javelin is “dead”, along with some other builds, and some other builds are meta. Buy you can use Javelin with other classes and you can use other builds with VK.
The only real difference between LE and PoE, at this point, is that LE hasn’t balanced classes in some time, because they’re mostly trying to finish implementing all of the stuff, and thus old masteries are underpowered and need more loving, whereas PoE looks at the balances every season. And even then, many classes/builds need more loving for a long time.
I expect EHG will start looking into boosting underpowered masteries after 1.0 when they have all 15 masteries in.
I can’t comment on this specific build that you picked.
But when you mean “a build disappeared”, you probably mean you don’t see it prominent anymore, that doesn’t mean its no longer “viable” (what ever that means to you).
PoE has a very lemming-train meta. There are two things that define the meta:
Top few dozens builds (rated by sited like PoE-Ninja and others similar sites)
Content Creator pushing a build in popularity and visibility
And even the Content Creators are often driven by whats objectively the best. There are very few content creators that are so in love with a specific build that they will stick to it regardless of if its “still playable” after a nerf. So naturally they will move away from it and then the domino-effect will cause the build to suddenly be way less popular.
A lot of the nerfed build are still really really good and especially people that don’t paly until very very lategame wouldn’t notice a lot of the nerfs of a lot of builds.
Again I don’t know the specifics of your example but I just wanted to agree with @Llama8 point that the cry out for buidls being “nerfed” in PoE from the PoE community is straight up hilarious at times.
It is literally like “OH MY GOD TORNADO SHOT GOT 5% LESS DAMAGE,! GUYS ITS UNPLAYABLE”.
I know there were more severe nerfs in teh past, but even those made these builds till be in the top 30/top 50, which is still more than most casual players will use to its fullest extent anyway.
To slighty get on topic again, not sure if that has been brought up, but having locked masteries will also hopefully help with people not hopping on the lemming-train meta to do a similar build, but it deals 5% more dmg because of a specific mastery.
If builds and classes are balanced enough so that creating a new character jsut to be 5% better in a lot of cases, that would probably be enough so that a lot of peopel would not create a new character jsut be have a slight numerical bonus (if the build is kidan the same beyond that).
What I mean when I say a build disappeared is that you can’t find a guide for it that has been updated in the last 2 years. If you want to play one you’d have to wing it, which, given the complexity of PoE builds, isn’t really doable for 99% of the players.
LE isn’t as inflexible, but as far as PoE goes, if there isn’t a build that has been updated for a couple of years, it’s effectively dead. Only a very few will have the build crafting knowledge to make it work.
I agree, but again, just because there is no build guide out for a specific skill or build doesn’t mean it’s bad. it is just not as good other the top performers.
But what means "to make it work" for you?
Everybody will have a different threshold for what is “viable” to them.
While playing PoE without a build guide is some monumental thing a lot of people are scared of, it is still a option. And one of the most fun options if you ask me, but obviously the majority will disagree with that.
I never ever in my life have used a build guide in PoE and still achieved what I consider “viable” on a plethora of builds in SSF, including builds that till this day never had a build guide.
Glacial Hammer, Heavy Strike, Hexblast (non-ignite), Hit-based Reap.
If anything, even if you disagree, just give it a thought and start your next build without a build guide, if there is a skill that you really like or want to like.
Honestly, I just mean getting to red maps. I can guarantee you that if you deleted all the guides, 99% of the players wouldn’t be able to make a build that would get them to do red maps reliably. The tree is just too massive with important nodes all over the place.
At least that was the way it was around Scourge (last league I played). Maybe with the power creep anything you manage to slap together can do red maps now.
I’m sure that, if I started not using guides, I could probably get used to it in maybe 2 or 3 seasons. Maybe more. The tree is just too massive. You look at builds and they quite often make huge detours just to get that node that completely changes the power level. Knowing what to get, when to get it and what synergizes best with what is something that requires quite some time.
Not to mention the fact that classes start in different spots and that ascendencies are vastly different. This creates a huge amount of combinations to try out where the vast majority are crappy.
Ultimately, not everyone is wired the same way. Some people look at PoE’s tree as a challenge and are able to make something work via trial and error. Others don’t have that aptitude or liking and will get frustrated by it. They just want to play.
If there were no guides, I would have never played PoE for as long as I did. I’d try it out in the first season, get frustrated and quit. Even though my brain is wired mostly to math/science things, PoE just overwhelms me and that’s not what I’m looking for in a game.
That’s not to say that I want D3/D4 level of “builds”. That’s way too easy. I like the way LE is balanced in that regard, even though I’ve only used guides so far. But over time I expect I might start trying things out on my own.
Anwyay, to sum up, almost all players in PoE use guides. When a build stops being updated, it’s effectively “dead” to the vast majority of players. And builds stop being updated when they start underperforming because of the constant balance shifts in PoE. And it’s not usually just 5%.
What is vd/dd spellslinger supposed to do? Create and detonate corpses at the same time as fast as you could attack
But spellslinger was nerfed, now it has a cooldown and thus the rapid part of the setup is gone - basically a major part of the core identity of the skill was removed and now you can create corpses faster and detonate them faster by removing spellslinger and just casting the spells really fast. The entire POINT of running spellslinger is no longer there.
By “the build is dead” he means THE. BUILD. IS. DEAD. Viability is not merely a matter of opinion, in a lot of cases it is a matter of strict fact
POE is hardly the game to hold up as a standard for balance. They have what, 62 thousand skill gems now? With another 25 thousand introduced every new season? I’m surprised they have as many as they do, that can actually be turned into viable builds.
LE has total, what POE releases new, every season. So to say it’s impossible for them to get that close to balanced in 2 or 3 years is kinda of setting the bar…well, almost on the ground. Maybe things will change once 1.0 hits, and we (maybe) get a dedicated skill/ability/balance team (which I doubt there is now).
I am not aware of any ARPG that has EVER managed to balance their game so that all classes are close in power. Not D2, not the various torchlights, not GD, not PoE, not even D3 or D4 and those have barely any choices in them at all.
All of them had some meta class that was stronger and some underdog class that struggled to do the things the others did.
I guess the closest you get to a balanced game is Wolcen, because it has no classes.
I don’t think it’s actually possible to achieve any sort of balance when a game has so many things that can affect the power level and many of those things are common and others don’t. There’s just too many moving parts to actually make all classes close.
True, PoE is an extreme case, but even the rest failed to do so.
I mean, I guess I have to agree – if the levels of nit-picking and microscopic inpection are infinite. I have at least 30 characters, of various builds, that can trash GD’s end-game. And there are dozens I have yet to try. So not sure which Meta exists there. So if having dozens upon dozens of more-than-capable builds isn’t a good balance job, I’m not sure what is.
Granted, I haven’t lurked the GD forums in a while, looking at class balance threads, but if there’s more than a handful of builds that can’t complete the end-game, I’d be surprised…given the talented theory-crafters, and overwhelming amount of gear available.
Just because most builds can do endgame doesn’t mean it’s balanced.
For one, not every build can do crate. At least reliably by itself. If you’re a good player that knows the mechanics you can make them work.
For another, some builds can do more SR than others. Or arena. So they’re not really balanced. There are always some builds that are better than others.
Although, to be fair, GD is probably the closest you get, and it’s mostly because it’s a single player game and it doesn’t get tweaked every 4 months.
The main problem in balancing classes is that you usually change something to boost some underpowered class, but it also affects others. Likewise for nerfs. For example, let’s say Shaman could use more mana regen. If you boost the overall mana regen, then you’re also boosting mages a lot when they didn’t need that boost. Likewise, if you were to nerf crit because some crit build is dominating, you’d also be nerfing other crit builds that are maybe much weaker.
My whole point was that there are many interlocking mechanics and that playing around with any of them usually tends do affect other characters in unforeseen ways (which is usually how you get the OP superbuilds that usually get nerfed within a couple weeks)
No different than picking your class at level 1. I think everyone agrees that the ability to change your class is non-desirable, and yet you need to make that decision with incomplete information, and we’re all OK with it. Mastery is no different, it is your class in this game.
The problem is not that we cannot respec Mastery choice, the problem is the players who do not see Mastery as their class.
But that will only lead to to a tree bloat. Where you need to keep constantly fixing stuff and adding those bonuses to the tree all the time. You might achieve some balance that way, but then you introduce a new unique, or a new mechanic and you need to rebalance again, so you add those bonuses again to the Shaman exclusive passives. At some point you’ll end up with a passive that gives “x bonus mana, y bonus crit, z move speed, etc etc”. It’s not a sustainable system, unless you don’t add new stuff.
Ok, that was just a semanthics issue, then. I meant it’s not a live service. You don’t connect to a game server, you don’t have seasons that shift the balance constantly.
You aren’t necessarily adding stuff to skill/passive trees but you are tweaking every patch to bring things into line as things are discovered to be out of line.
Yup, that’s what you get for having a live service game model. As you add new stuff you have to keep on tweaking all the old stuff.
